Another chapter is here!
Enjoy!
Sarutobi Hiruzen fought the urge to yawn as the night dragged on. Reports continuously came in regarding the escapees, their numbers now few. It wouldn't be long before those that were still within the Land of Fire were captive. The mystery of how they escaped had been solved, courtesy of a Messenger Toad from Naruto and questioning a few of the escapees, but the reason why eluded him even now.
Granted, there were other questions still to be answered. Like how they knew of Naruto's location. But, with the Sound shinobi captured by Anko, they would have them in time. Inoichi and Ibiki would see to that much. So he settled on rubbing his eyes with his good hand for now, rather than stew on the machinations of Orochimaru's right-hand man.
"You shouldn't push yourself, Old Man," said the only other person in the room. Looking out at the village from the window was Tsunade, a Transformation hiding her normal appearance and several documents in her hand. She had come to help with the workload, even if she was reluctant to be seen. "You're still recovering."
"There's no one else who can do this at the moment with Jiraiya away," he said with a sigh. Jiraiya should have received word by now on the matter, but it would still be hours before he could return.
Knock. Knock. There was a knock on the door that drew their attention. Once permission was given an Anbu entered. The man was adorned in a flak jacket, a mask that had a cat's face on it, and a sword on the right side of his back.
"Tenzo, what news do you have for me?" Sarutobi asked.
"A pair of our shinobi have been brought to the village's gates by a snake summoning," he reported. "One of them is Naruto Uzumaki, who has sustained numerous injuries and required immediate medical attention. The kunoichi accompanying him, identifying herself as Karin Uzumaki, claimed she has information to report to you as she was escorted to the hospital for her injuries."
"I see." That left him in a bit of a predicament. He shouldn't leave his post in the middle of things as they stood, but the information that she held could prove vital. Not to mention when he attempted to rise to his feet moments before, the bones in his back loudly contested the decision with audible crackles as a testament to his age. "Guard their room and ensure that no one enters for now, Tenzo. I'll have someone sent along shortly."
As the Anbu departed from the room with haste, off to accomplish his task, the Hokage turned to Tsunade.
She picked up where he was going without the need for words. "You want me to go?"
"I cannot leave my post at the moment, and the information that she has could be pertinent," he said. "There's no one more qualified to look after the members of your Grandmother's clan than you are."
Next to Shizune, they were possibly the closest ties she had to family through her grandmother's side. The same Uzumaki blood also flowed through her veins to an extent, and he would like to have her tested to see if she could also utilize those masks that were retrieved from the temple as well. However, he had been putting it off until she was in a better state of mind since her enforced sobriety, which had left her… cranky, for lack of a better term.
"Or would you rather take my place here and handle overseeing everything until my return?"
A slight, indignant huff left her mouth at that. "You don't have to try and blackmail me. I'm going. Just tell me what I need to know about the brats."
[-oOo-]
The closest thing I have to a family, huh? Tsunade couldn't help but feel a little offended that the old man tried to play that card in an effort to get her to act. The only people she could call family were already dead, with perhaps the exception of Shizune.
Still, taking a report and checking on some mild injuries were far easier than dealing with all the documentation that he had to do. It was also probably meant to test whether or not her therapy was having any real effect so far. Shizune was on-call at the hospital at the moment, so it probably would have crossed his mind for her to call in her apprentice for help in looking after them if she couldn't.
Arriving at the hospital while in her disguise, she presented the seal given to her by the old man to the Anbu standing at attention in front of the door. He moved, allowing her to enter into the room. There she found the two Uzumaki.
The blond boy that Jiraiya was fond of was lying unconscious on the bed, in an examination gown. The girl, also in an examination gown, was staring at Tsunade from his bedside; despite there being a second one two steps away that she should be resting on given the situation. That rankled Tsunade to an extent, when patients did things that could worsen their condition. What was the point in treating them then?
Taking a look at the charts laid out on the table, she saw that they had done some preliminary treatment for the burns in the girl's case. That involved cleaning the wounds of whatever they may have come into contact with while in a snake's stomach, giving her medication to help with the pain control, and applying dressings to them as a temporary measure to keep the nerve endings from being exposed for the moment. There were tears in her eyes, but it was hard to tell if that was from the pain, as it was generally a bad idea for someone with burn wounds to move around actively, or because of the boy.
The boy's charts read different enough that she'd need to see it herself the extent of the damage.
"…You're the woman from when they woke me up," Karin said, breaking the silence to that point. "Why are you wearing a disguise over that genjutsu?"
"That's my business," Tsunade said in a dismissive tone. "If you remember that I was there when you first woke up, then you know I'm familiar with the Hokage. He sent me here to find out what happened and see if I can treat your wounds."
"Naruto first," the girl said. "I just have mild chakra burns and exhaustion, but he had it worse."
"I'll be the one to determine that." She walked over to the boy's bedside. "Lie down in the other bed and explain what happened while I look into him."
Karin looked reluctant to leave his side until Tsunade gave her a stern stare. Then she stepped back until she reached the opposite bed and sat on it. "How much do you know already?"
"Everything the old man told me." She opened the examination gown and peeled back the dressings enough to where she could see just how severe the damage was. At a glance, parts of his epidermis and the layers beneath it were outright gone, exposing the muscular system beneath it. There weren't standard signs of burns present, so it wasn't a fire technique, and a wind technique didn't seem likely given the shape.
More concerning was the fact that the most damaged part was his abdomen, where his seal was located at. She suspected that it was still intact since there was no rampaging giant fox at present to further compound the old man's troubles. But they needed to get Jiraiya here fast.
With her hands alight with pale green light, Tsunade hovered them over his injuries to find that the wounds were still saturated with traces of the Tailed Beast's chakra that lingered. It would need to be purged before the wounds could be properly healed. And that would take time. "What drove him to using the Nine-Tailed Fox's chakra to this extent?"
"We were attacked by people with Cursed Seals that could activate a second stage transformation," she said. "One of them could use their bones as a weapon and he was too strong. Naruto brought out a tail to fight him, but he had to go to three when the bone-user went to a second stage transformation. It would have gone further if I hadn't stepped in at the last moment, but his body was like that."
"Well, he doesn't seem to be getting worse, but they're probably going to have to keep him under to prevent him from feeling any pain until Jiraiya can get here to check on his seal." Replacing the dressing, Tsunade moved over to Karin and had her lie down so she could check on her injuries. "How did you stop him?"
"Earlier today, my overseer and I discovered that I could create chains of chakra," she said. "They somehow seal foreign chakra. Then we got called out to go on the search and everything went wrong. I had to get close to stop him and then bite myself to heal, but there was nothing left in me. We only got away because she stayed behind after her summoning swallowed us. You have to send someone to get her before they take her to Kabuto."
"Do you know why they came after you?" Tsunade asked while checking on the extent of damage to her body. The girl's burns looked mild, but from how she was talking they were far more severe until she healed herself. They could be treated relatively easily, at the very least. "You're the only ones who were actively attacked from the sound of it."
"I don't really. All I know is that they didn't want us dead," Karin said. "They wanted us alive, so they kept trying to cripple us. We sent one of them tied up to the village. Did you learn anything from her?"
"T & I is handling that as we speak." Tsunade hovered her hands over Karin's bite-marks to see if they were possible to heal. It seemed like even though she could heal herself to where the damage done would heal to good as new and wouldn't produce scar tissue on its own, the marks were permanently imprinted through them upon being used as a medium to heal the rest of her body. It was fascinating from a medical standpoint, but for now that could wait.
She needed to tell the Hokage about what she learned.
[-oOo-]
Pain stung at Naruto as he woke up, only for the glare of sunlight leaking through the blinds of the room to spear into his eyes. He screwed his eyes shut and turned his head away from it on reflex, his thoughts sluggish as his mind felt like it was cloudy. Slowly opening his eyes again, he took in the details of his surroundings and realized that he was in a hospital room.
How did I get here? As he focused on that question in his mind, the memories bubbled back up to the surface in vivid flashes. He could recall the pain of being pierced, the seething hatred and strength coursing through his body like a raging river, and how he fought to keep himself above it and regain control as the cloak attacked Karin and she threw herself into it.
"Kar—" Dryness clawed at his throat as the hoarse words tried to come out, leaving him coughing violently. He churned his tongue against the roof and inner lining of his cheeks to soothe it, swallowing whatever saliva he could, but it wasn't enough.
"Nnn…" A soft moan reached his ears from the blinding light that he turned away from, a rising shadow being cast over his head. "Naruto? Are you awake now?"
He forced his head to turn around and see that Karin was in a chair by his bedside. Her red hair was disorderly and her eyes were droopy as she rubbed them. But she was alive, which lightened the weight he felt in his chest.
"Thank goodness you're awake," Karin said, a soft smile on her face filled with relief. "You've been out for about two days now. How do you feel?"
He tried to speak, but the cough came back.
"Oh, she said that you might be thirsty if you woke up today. I'll get you some water." Karin immediately fetched him a glass of water and supported his head upwards so that he could drink it enough to ease the dryness in his throat. "Better?"
"Yeah." He sighed as the cool water brought also brought clarity as she laid his head back down on the pillow. He tried to move his body only to find that it was non-responsive. The signals were being sent, but his body felt too weak to respond. When he tried to mold chakra, he found that it was cut-off as well. "Why can't I move or feel my chakra?"
"They said that you had pushed your body a bit too hard, and wanted to make sure that you could heal properly, so they needed to seal your chakra flow." She placed her hand over his stomach, above the examination gown. "Jiraiya-san came in yesterday and did this thing where his fingers were alight with chakra, pressing it to your stomach seal. He said it would block off the chakra from the Nine-Tailed Fox, and then drew another one to leech out the rest so they could properly heal you, but stated it would leave you unconscious for an additional day."
"They sealed it?" Now that he thought about it, the feeling was similar to when the snake bastard had screwed with his seal in the Forest of Death. But, more than that, he remembered why they would do so. It made his expression slough off from one of relief to sorrow. "… I hurt you, didn't I?"
"That wasn't you," she said, her tone soft and reassuring. "In fact, if you hadn't been trying so hard to keep it under control, I wouldn't have been able to help you. And it's not like I was hurt that badly. They healed me right up while you slept, but they wanted to keep me in for observation."
"I still shouldn't have used it," he said. "I was so angry after he stabbed you that I lost it. After that it just kept pushing me to go further. I didn't want to go to three tails because I wasn't sure I could control it. But if I didn't…"
"Naruto, you didn't have a choice." She moved her hand down towards where his was and her fingers closed around it. "Even the Hokage agreed."
"The Old Man came by?"
She nodded. "He… had someone look into my memories, to share them with him and Jiraiya-san and that woman they were with. They said that the bone-user was a member of some kind of clan from the Land of Water that was supposed to be wiped out. Those people from Sound killed Anbu Officers, and he was stronger than them. So they agreed that you didn't have a choice. If anything, I was the one who couldn't do enough."
Her smile faltered and her shoulders fell as she lowered her head, hiding her eyes. "I had to be protected by you and Anko-san, and it led to you relying on the Nine-Tailed Fox's chakra while she sacrificed herself so that we could get away. I couldn't even stop Byakko's mask from being shattered in the end, and I couldn't even heal the damage to your body. I was mostly useless."
She looked like she was on the verge of crying. Naruto wanted to reach up to comfort her, but couldn't even move his arm well enough to do so. He settled for twisting his hand around so that he could try to at least hold hers. "It's okay. No one could have seen that happening."
"But I should have," she said. "I should have known Kabuto would come after me, but I didn't and he crippled me for it. He got around my Mind's Eye and left me helpless the majority of the time. The only reason it wasn't a repeat of what happened during the Invasion was because the Chakra Chains I found out how to make not even an hour before we got called out. Even then I had to be carried and protected the entire time because of the stupid seal placed on me."
Naruto blinked at that. "Chakra Chains?"
She cupped her hands and a golden chain emerged from her palm. "I'm not really sure what they are. I was just trying to make Chakra Threads and they assumed this form. The only thing I do know is that they can interfere and inhibit chakra."
"The more accurate name is Adamantine Sealing Chains," a voice piped up from the window. Karin turned her body and stepped out of the way so Naruto could make out that it was Jiraiya standing outside the window. When did he get there?
"Adamantine Sealing Chains?" Karin held the chain up towards him. "Did you and the Hokage know that I could do this then?"
"We couldn't be sure," Jiraiya said as he entered the window and started walking towards them. "It's a very rare trait found in some members of the Uzumaki clan's chakra, who are scattered as is. The only user I've ever met was Naruto's mother, who was proficient enough with them that she could create a barrier that isn't easily breached. That and the nature of her chakra was the reason that she was brought to the village in the first place."
The Toad Sage came to a stop in front of the bed and addressed Naruto. "How are you feeling kid?"
"I can't move well, but other than that I'm fine," Naruto said, his thoughts partially on what was said about his mother. There was a story there that Naruto wanted to know about. The way he spoke implied that his mother had something special inherent to her beyond working on his seal.
"That's good, all things considered," he said. "There's a lot we need to talk about involving both of you, so I'll start with the bad news first. As of this moment, neither of you will be allowed to leave the village's territory until further notice."